Day 43 (A Sightseeing day @ Cajun Encounters Swamp Tours) 176.3 miles, New Total = 8,566.9 miles

As I spoke of yesterday, we traded a day on Bourbon Street for a 2 hour trip into the swamp.  Our reservation was for 12 Noon and the ride was about 80 miles from our campground to Slidell, LA, which is at the East end of Lake Ponchatrain.  It was soon obvious that the noontime trip was the most popular as 2 small full tour buses showed up.  We soon found out each boat held 22 people and we would soon fill 3 boats.  Jan's last minute trip to the Ladies Room turned into an opportunity as we ended up in the end seats in the front of the boat.

 The 2 hour tour was broken into 2 segments.  First a trip down one of the tributaries of the Pearl  River to see some alligators, and the second hour was a trip deep into the Honey Island Swamp.

After cruising a short distance from the dock we turned on the gas and took a high speed (about 35 MPH) cruise down river and into a smaller side channel.  We were quickly confronted with small fish (10-12") jumping out of the water randomly around the boat.  I thought they were catching something airborne, but the guide, Captain Mike, told us they were striped mullet. They are basically bottom feeders and spend a lot of time in the mud and they race to the surface and jump into the air (1-2') to flush the mud from their gills.  Unfortunately I wasn't fast enough with my camera, and not smart enough to use the video mode to catch any shots of them. But it was entertaining.  It took only a few minutes of cruising (at a very slow speed) before we spotted our first gator.

It wasn't too large (3-4') but we were just as excited as if it were 10.  Captain Mike tried to lure him closer to the boat by throwing marshmallows into the water.  He didn't seem interested, but very quickly a second approached us from the rear and proved to be quite hungry and ate 3 or 4.  We spent about 1/2 hour cruising up this channel and saw no less than a dozen and maybe close to 2 dozen gators, in the water and basking on the shore along the route.  The largest was probably about 6 or 7 feet.

A trip up another channel continued this adventure with almost as many sightings. Unexpectedly we also saw some remnants of the destruction of Hurricane Katrina (piles of dock debris and overturned boats).

Down this new channel we baited the gators with pieces of hotdog on a stick as they approached the boat ad Captain Mike was able to get 2 of them to jump out of the water almost 3 feet to retrieve the hotdog or marshmallow  This was very cool!

Sightings continued as we retraced our steps out of this channel and we then motored ( at high speed again) back toward the dock to begin our second part of the tour.